1. CERN 22nd European School
Utrecht University
CERN 22nd European School
of High Energy Physics
Garderen 2014
Theory Outlook
Spinoza Institute,
Utrecht University
Gerard ’t Hooft

2. g
The
STANDARD
MODEL

3. Planck length :
TODAY’s
dream
GUTs
TODAY’s
limit

4. The Planck Units:

5. Essential clues needed:
What’s the first thing beyond today’s limit ?
Is there supersymmetry ?
Extra dimensions ?
Nothing ??
phenomenology | basic theory

6. Supersymmetry:
a promising new view on space and time
since Einstein 1916
mass
Dirac
vector multiplet
photon
gravitino
graviton
multiplet
graviton
spin

7. Extra Dimensions y y y x
Extra dimensions: Kaluza Klein towers:

8. Compositeness
Proton
Quarks ?
Hexas
Pentas

9. Problem with the compositeness idea:
Quarks and leptons are light; but their constituents must be
very pointlike (invisible below a TeV).
Compare: pions are light, yet quarks are pointlike.
Pions are protected by the conservation of the chiral current (PCAC).
We need such a protection mechanism for the pentas.
Chiral currents can be conserved only if they are not broken by anomalies. They must contribute to the anomalies exactly as the chiral currents that protect the leptons and the quarks themselves ...
Anomaly matching conditions
These conditions tell you how many light fermions you can build out of pointlike constituents, and usually those numbers seem to emerge as fractional.

10. c a b

11. What is Nature’s book keeping system?
To better guess about what’s out there, investigate the other end of the highway through the desert:
The end point is quantum gravity
Amazingly, we have no comprehensive theoretical models telling us how to do this right:
- what happens to space and time? Do they become discrete?
- how should the complete spectrum of physical states be
described?
- how does the spectrum of black holes relate to the spectrum
of the elementary field quanta?
What is Nature’s book keeping system?
Superstring Theory comes closest to such a theory,
but it has too many ill understood features
superstring theory cannot be the entire truth regarding physics at the Planck scale

12. Quantum gravity must be the end point:
At the Planck scale: - gravitational interactions become strong
- space-time curvature becomes unbounded
Holographic principle: - limit to density of quantum states
per unit of surface
- this is the scale where black holes behave as particles, and particles behave as
black holes.
Most investigators take it for granted that the smallest pieces of information are qubits.
But it’s quantum mechanics that is one of the causes of our problems there: basic operators such as displacement pμ in space and time, become ambiguous due to curvature.
Proposal: the elementary unit of information could be classical:
a single boolean bit.

13. You can’t have local counterfactual realism
The idea that there are ordinary bits & bytes underlying quantum mechanics is very old …
and most often categorically dismissed:
Bell’s theorem and CHSH inequality.
John S. Bell
J.F. Clauser,
M.A. Horne,
Shimony,
R.A. Holt.
But what they prove, is not quite that. Rather:
You can’t have local counterfactual realism

14. The Cellular Automaton Interpretation of Quantum Mechanics ( CAI )
Compulsory or impossible ?

15. THE SCALAR SECTOR At the Planck scale, nature is just an
information processing machine
( Perhaps fundamentally quantum mechanical, but possibly simply classical )
Can we link this to LHC physics or other directly observable features?
Probably not. But maybe we can shed some light on
THE SCALAR SECTOR
- The Higgs particle and its mass
- Quadratic divergences and naturalness in QFT
- The tachyon in string theories
- Conformal symmetries in gravity

16. Why is the universe so big ?
Scale transformations cover some 20 orders of magnitude from the Higgs to the Planck scale.
Now assume this symmetry to be only very weakly broken (as concluded from the very special value found for the Higgs mass)
Scale symmetry -- Conformal symmetry
Could conformal symmetry, rather than supersymmetry, be used to restore naturalness?
The Hierarchy problem:
Why is the universe so big ?
Can any “simple” theory explain our gigantically complex universe?

17. Sizes in the Universe
Size of Universe itself:
Size of stars and planets:
Size of Atoms: …
Planck size:
Size of humans:

18. The Planck Units:

19. Many other constants make dimensionless combinations :
Fine structure constant :
proton mass
Planck units :
proton mass
electron mass :
Cosmological Constant
Planck units :

20. Size atomic nucleus:
Size of atoms :
Density of rock:
Mass of planet (chemical):

21. Mass of planet (chemical):
mass of star (nuclear)
mass of planet (chemical) :
“ Size of the universe”
Planck length :

22. The anthropic argument:
“Constants of Nature are what they are (very big or very small) because if they weren’t, we wouldn’t be here to observe them …”
Other universes, with different constants, exist but are not inhabited …
One version of this anthropic argument is obviously true:

23. M Theory:
The Landschape
Our Universe ? x

24. Alternative approach to the hierarchy problem:
Large and small mathematical numbers can arise very quickly in theories with only modest complexity
Or: can we find a natural theory that generates a quantum world where masses and interaction constants take values that range over scales up to more than orders of magnitude?
Possible strategy:
First: find a theory that leads to non-interacting, massless quantum fields.
Next: introduce a very t i n y interaction or disturbance of the scale invariance.
This might generate tiny masses (at the Planck scale) and tiny running couplings (very tiny beta functions)

25. ≈
But it is not known how to carry out such a program
This is where new ideas are needed.